1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of voice applications and biometric analysis and more particularly to a system and method that analyzes call center agent biometric patterns in order to detect and prevent potential problems thus assuring improved customer call handling and satisfaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Providing quality customer service is increasingly important in today's competitive business environment. Product and service providers need to maintain their existing customers while constantly seeking to acquire new ones. Although the adoption of self-service channels such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and the Internet is increasing, it by no means replaces human customer service agents.
Although self-service channels provide consistent service to customers, service provided by humans is very subjective and is therefore suitable for providing quick, real-time responses and quickly adapts to specific customer needs. A customer's overall satisfaction with a customer service agent often depends on factors such as the agent's interpersonal skills, mood, and personality. Current methods for providing quality assurance between agents and customers include recording the conversations and playing them back at a later date in order to analyze them offline and take corrective action if necessary. These methods fall short of providing a dynamic quality assurance system since they do not address problems as they arise during the call agent's interaction with the customer.
Another method of enhancing the agent-customer telephone interaction includes determining if the caller has an accent, and if so, redirecting the call to an agent skilled in determining the language of the accent. Still other methods provide real-time dialog assistance to a call center agent by recognizing certain phrases and suggesting a different response phrase. However, these methods do not adequately provide a monitoring system for determining the level of quality in the call agent's dialog with the customer and do not provide a means of taking immediate corrective action using a rule-based system should it be determined that the quality of the call agent's dialog has dropped below a required level.
Biometric data can provide useful information about a person's overall wellness and mood. During a call agent's conversation with a customer, the call agent may become frustrated, annoyed, angry and/or confrontational. At first, these emotions may not be present in the call agent's voice. However, the build up of these emotions might be detected by monitoring certain biometric characteristics. Facial or body expressions might indicate growing frustration on the part of the call agent while conversing with an unruly customer, ultimately leading to argumentative or unprofessional responses to the customer. By monitoring these biometric characteristics as they occur, corrective action can be taken and quality assurance maintained.